Dashboards, Portal Pages & Landing Pages... What's the Diff?

[Music] hello and welcome everyone this is Mike I'm the founder and CEO of SuiteDash SuiteDash is the ultimate all-in-one business software multitool perfect for small to medium-sized businesses seeking to streamline and automate their systems and processes our goal with this podcast is to provide you with a steady stream of you useful and entertaining updates tips tricks interviews and insights that will help you maximize the impact of SuiteDash on your business and your [Music] life all right everyone welcome this is Mike I'm

Your host for the succeed with software podcast so this is somewhat of a new format it will be quite informal it will be audio only for the most part occasionally we'll insert video slides or reference visual material and if that's necessary we'll make sure that we indicate that to you so you would know to go watch on YouTube or whatever but in general our goal here is to make this audio only so that you can listen to this in the car or on your walks or in any place that it's convenient for you because the idea is that this is a steady stream of information that has to be created kind of on the Fly because we are updating new features or releasing new features and as you know we do that quite often so the capability to

Release a constant stream of production quality video that is updated constantly and always accurate and stays accurate is really a challenge that's more on par with something like a media company which we are definitely not but we recognize that hey you guys need to know these things and looking in the documentation is not always enough to really get the ideas implanted in your head and so we'll do our best to just talk it out here just hey let's take a subject I will talk about it I will Riff on it I will explain the wins the wise the hows as much as possible and I think it'll be really helpful to turn on light bulbs and simplify your path to getting to where

You need to be which is # sweet Freedom right so that's not to say we won't have guests there won't be other hosts this could definitely happen and is already being planned as far as having interviews with members of our community who are doing interesting or impressive things or with members of our team or maybe our coaches really there's no rules it's just about helping you guys and finding ways to do that that are very efficient and fit into what you need so we'll keep experimenting we'll keep taking suggestions and I'm sure that we'll arrive at a place that our mutual goals will be achieved we're going to do our best to keep these episodes short 10 to 15 minutes is the goal many of you probably listen at

1.5x or 2x so you can get through it even faster so when new features come out or New Concepts need to be explained this is probably how we'll do it we'll still have VIP sneak peek sessions and VIP Academy sessions where we're live teaching on specific subjects or specific features so keep your eyes out for those but hopefully this podcast format will fill a gap and be helpful for the community okay so we have that out of the way and it's time to start with our first subject and this is a question we get fairly often and that is what is the difference between dashboards portal pages and landing pages so there's three elements here that on the surface may seem to be somewhat

Similar but they have each of them a specific and important purpose and functionality so let's let's look at it let's start with dashboards so as you're probably aware and familiar with with most every software that you get into has some dashboard functionality some home return to HUB Central starting place and that's typically what your users are going to think of when they see the term dashboard or whatever you decide to call it and our dashboards are no different they're meant to be that single place where you can return to at any time you can use it that way or you can use it in a different way but that is the primary functionality that's designed for so for example right out of the box you're going to have a native dashboard menu

Link in the primary navigation which is the navigation on your left and when that dashboard link is clicked it's going to take the user the logged in user whoever they are to their assigned dashboard additionally with this functionality when the main logo the primary logo which is in the top left is clicked also back to the assigned dashboard which is a fairly common functionality in websites Etc and this is pretty instinctual user Behavior right when they need to start over or they get lost or whatever they're going to go back to a dashboard and that's really how you should think about it in SuiteDash you can create multiple dashboards so there's not just one you can create 100 dashboards if you'd like and use them for different purposes based on your

Needs dashboards can be assigned to clients or to staff so you can create bespoke dashboards for clients of a certain type this type that type the other type and you can create dashboards that are specifically designed for your staff maybe they have information or content that you only want your staff to see or buttons or links to staff submit forms or whatever works for you to help codify your internal processes you can create purpose built dashboards for staff members with this role or that role or this job or that job and assign them properly to those specific people and they will see only that so when you create a dashboard in your managing that particular dashboard you can assign it using a priority assignment system that gives you

The options of assigning based on a circle or on a team or on a role or even individual assignment if you need to assign a dashboard to one specific individual person just a single person you can do that if you'd like we typically don't encourage that we want you to use a more powerful mechanism but if you need to you can and most of you probably understand that since I can assign say dashboard a to Circle A and dashboard B to Circle B if during my onboarding process or whatever process I'm trying to build if I need to switch a client from Circle A to Circle B maybe they qualify as a different type of client now or you're moving them from one phase to another phase when they change circles they'll also have a different dashboard assigned based on that Circle so

This means you can show your clients or your staff One dashboard at a single moment in time but then when they need to see a different dashboard easy as changing their Circle and then they're going to see the dashboard that's associated with that new Circle and this accomplishes your goal because you needed them to move from One dashboard to another dashboard to see different content or have access to different assets Etc and here's maybe the main differentiator about dashboards in the other two portal pages and landing pages is at any one moment it's impossible for any user to have more than one dashboard assigned and you'll see how this works we're going to link l in the show notes to a video that explains exactly this priority assignment logic it's really simple it

Might sound complicated but when you hear it explained it makes a lot of sense okay so let's go ahead and move on to portal pages so right off the bat portal pages are a little different than dashboards in that multiple portal Pages can be assigned to a single user and this can be client or staff even clients and staff so the best way to think about it is that you can create a private intranet meaning they must be logged in to see portal pages and they can only see the portal pages that you have assigned to them whether that's one five or 100 and so you can completely control a spectrum of pages that's available invisible to a specific client or circle of clients or staff member or team of

Staff members Etc you can assign them in bulk to every client you can assign them in bulk to every staff member they're super flexible and again it's really a good way to create an internet an internal knowledge base a place to record your internal systems or best practices or however you want to use them portal pages are a very flexible tool that can be used in all sorts of ways depending on your needs now the way they are accessed is up to you as well what we do by default is we build What's called the dynamic Pages menu which means if you leave that enabled when a user logs in in we'll look at that user and say okay this user has access to these 24 portal Pages let's say in four categories

Which you set and then we build a Pages menu we call it that consists of four sub items which equate to the categories and then subub items which are the portal Pages inside each category now you are able to reorder the categories or the sub items and you are able to reorder the portal Pages which are the Sub sub items how they appear in order inside the category also which is the sub item but don't over complicate it you have a primary top level menu a sub item menu and a subub item menu I think most of you are familiar with the way this nested menu structure works if you don't want a page to be in a dynamic Pages menu you can turn it off and in fact if you turn it off for every

Portal page that you buil it will never show and if that's the way you want to approach it you can actually build your own custom menu and Link directly to the portal Pages as you want to using our custom menu functionality or what some people do is from a dashboard they might create a spectrum of button blocks and link to the deeper portal Pages using those button blocks or hyperlinks from a dashboard or some other portal page so there's lots of ways to do it out of the box we give you something that's just kind of working straight away if you want to bypass that we give you the tools to do that so once you decide how to approach it you'll be welling in your way now keep in mind also that on Portal Pages we allow you to yes assign a portal page based on Circle team or individual or role all these all these ways but

On each portal page as well as on dashboards and on landing pages which we'll cover next you have the ability to show or hide specific rows of content or blocks of content inside that portal page based on Circle and team so this means you could assign a portal page to every client you can check that box and say I want every client to have access to this portal page and then throughout the portal page you can selectively show or hide different rows to various circles that you might be using which are typically types of clients so all of your clients will see the portal page but some of them will only see some of the content and other clients will see other content this is possible it's not required but it's possible for you and the reason we do this is

This might be helpful to you to prevent you from having to create multiple portal Pages you can just create one and then kind of control that one little piece or part that needs to be different based on circles you can control that inside that single portal page and now it's less work for you to create and maintain and the last concept to cover with portal pages is what we call the start page functionality and what this means is you can create a portal page and then assign it as a start page for a specific individual or Circle and that means when they log in in instead of going directly to the dashboard which is the native default functionality they'll be redirected to this start page first and from there you can direct them by

Buttons or links to somewhere else but we won't take them back to that start page unless you provide a direct link until they log out and log back in this is not the dashboard let's be clear if they log in and they have a start page assigned they'll go to the start page and then if they click dashboard they'll go to a completely different place which is their assigned dashboard that moment and the use case for a start page is something that is really referred to in the industry as an interstitial or like a one-time piece of information that you're trying to show them maybe it's a disclaimer maybe it's something like that that you say okay I don't want this to be your dashboard which means you can return to it over and over by clicking dashboard dashboard I want you to see it one time maybe agree to it whatever you have there and then they

Just don't see it again and then maybe you change their Circle so that that's not start page assigned to them now and then the next time they log in they go to their dashboard or if you change their Circle maybe they see a different start page next time so this gives you the ability to present something in that one moment that's really that's all they need to see it the admission is accomplished and now they can move on and use dashboard functionality normally and use the functionality of the portal without having that start page or links to that start page rolled into their experience after that and before we leave portal pages let's be very clear portal pages are only accessible to a logged in authenticated user they are protected from Public Access

Okay you probably saw this coming but that was a setup because in contrast our third element is landing pages and the primary functionality of landing pages is that they are publicly available in fact when you create one and you publish it it will give you a public URL that you can then use now this public URL that we generate for you in the beginning is of course generated with random characters it's meant to be unique but if you have a custom URL set up meaning you're logging in at your custom domain name then you also have the option of assigning what we call a friendly URL which means you can Define what the quote slug is which means the trailing part

Of the URL so if you want to make it something like get started or special offer or whatever you want to make it you can make it that way that combines with your custom URL and you can put that on business cards or flyers or whatever and in addition you can create a custom QR code that you can put on those same things even on videos so that people can quickly access using their mobile device and landing pages will typically be a device that you would want to use to place an offer in front of the the public or some other types of information in front of the public or you can even use it as your primary website if you want you can create multiple landing pages and Link them together just like you would a

Website with some navigation with some buttons but what's unique different and Powerful about these landing pages is that much in the same way that you could control visibility in Portal pages and dashboards visibility of rows and blocks landing pages also have what are called public and private blocks so if you user is on your landing page and you've never seen them before they're not registered in your system they're not logged in then they will just see the public blocks but if you have a returning user say who was in your portal at one time and then they come back and they arrive on your landing page and the session that they created from that one

Login is still active in that browser we recognize that and now we say oh we've seen this person before and then based on your definitions in that private block meaning this circle or that team or this role or that person if they fit that description in that private block then we will show them that private block so what this means is that you can create a quote landing page or website experience that looks one way to a complete stranger but if someone from your CRM a quote known Target shows up and they still have the session active in the browser and we can recognize them then we look to see if they fit the profile that you have configured in these private

Blocks and if they do we'll show them the private blocks also so now you have a web experience a public web experience that has the potential to morph based on who is looking at it and this has a lot of implications and use cases around marketing and retargeting and all these buzzwords like this it's a powerful functionality it's an advanced functionality you don't have to use it but it's there for you to use and it's another advantage of having this kind of functionality like landing page in the same platform that also houses your CRM and all your internal structures Etc this gives you the capability to merge those two in a way that's really really powerful depending on your use case and to further that no in

The future we plan to also build in what are called otls or onetime links you would know it as magic login into more and more of our communication tools so that when a member of your target audience clicks a link that link might not be designed to log them in but what it will do is set a session in their browser that's designed for you then to be able to display additional parts of landing pages to them additional content different types of offers Etc because they click that link we then set a cookie in the browser we have that session we know not necessarily exactly who they are but we know them by that session and we can then Mark it to them based

On your definitions so to summarize landing pages can be used in ways that are exposed to the public but also can morph based on if that member of your target audience has a session in the browser and you can use these landing pages as an element that sits at the top of your funnel for example to draw people in to educate them with the primary goal of turning them into a paying client all right everyone I think that does it that's the difference between dashboards portal pages and landing pages as always if you have questions you can email help sd.com if you have questions that you'd like to hear you're covered on the podcast please

Email podcast sd.com and indicate in the subject line podcast question of course we have our own list of internal subjects that will be covered in this podcast but we'll do our best to cover as many of your questions as possible so make sure you're subscribed so that you're notified when new episodes are released we'd be happy to hear any and all feedback on this new format so thanks for providing ing that and we'll see you in the next one thanks everyone see you bye [Music]